


license my roving hands

by curtaincall



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, Sequel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-10
Updated: 2015-10-09
Packaged: 2018-04-25 15:54:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4967059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/curtaincall/pseuds/curtaincall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>College AU. Sequel to "let us sport us while we may."<br/>Amy Santiago and Jake Peralta broke up after high school graduation--but they attend neighboring colleges, and when circumstances push them together again, old feelings resurface along with new complications.</p>
            </blockquote>





	license my roving hands

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! I'm excited to be writing again...new season of B99, and new fic from me!   
> This is a sequel to "let us sport us while we may," so you might want to read that first, but I think this should be able to stand alone as well.  
> Work title is from John Donne's poem "To His Mistress Going to Bed," and the title of this chapter is from W. B. Yeats'   
> "Adam's Curse."

as weary-hearted as the hollow moon:

 

The Schur High School Young Alumni Lunch falls on a Wednesday, the week before Amy Santiago’s scheduled to head back for her second semester of college. The whole train ride to the school, she taps her foot in nervous excitement, looking out the subway window and alternating between wishing they were moving faster and stopped altogether. The excitement has several sources--she’s looking forward to seeing her high school friends again, the ones she hasn’t kept in touch with as stringently as she’d like, and hearing about how well everything’s going for them, how they’re adjusting to college and living in dorms and dining hall food. And she wants to see some of her teachers, too, Mr. Holt especially, whose recommendation letter was, she’s pretty sure, the number-one best thing about her very impressive college applications.

The nervousness stems from how there are sure to be some people at the lunch that she absolutely does not want to see, no way, nope, not today and maybe not ever--okay, it’s only one person, one person she’s dreading having to talk to again: her academic competition-turned-friend-turned-boyfriend-turned-ex-boyfriend, Jake Peralta.

She hasn’t seen Jake since the day, two weeks after high school graduation, that she broke up with him.

 

_“I just think,” Amy said, holding her gaze steady on one of the slats in the park bench where they were sitting, “that it makes more sense to do it now, to break up but stay friends, than to try to make the high-school-into-college relationship transition. It’s doomed to fail. One or the other of us would get sick of it, but we’d keep on going for fear of hurting each other, and I don’t think that’s the way we want this to end.”_

_“I don’t want it to end at all,” said Jake, quietly, and she could hear the frustration behind his words, though he stayed uncharacteristically calm. “I mean, come on, Ames, it’s not like we’d be doing long distance! You’re going to Fox College. I’m going to Fremulon College. They’re sister schools! They’re barely five miles apart! Did you not even read the brochures? Students can take classes at the other school, they can go to events at the other school, they can even live at the other school. I don’t think that seeing each other is exactly going to be a problem.”_

_“Jake,” Amy said, tearing her eyes away from the slat and looking at him directly, “I do love you.”_

_“I love you, too,” he said, so quickly she didn’t understand what he had said until a few seconds after. “And I love dating you. I love that I get to see you every day, I love that you complain to me about your brothers disturbing your perfectly-organized sock drawer, I love that you were our class valedictorian and all through graduation, all through your speech, I couldn’t even hear a word of it because I just kept thinking, yeah, that’s my girlfriend, that’s my Amy. The past year has been so, so amazing, and I just don’t get, at all, why you want to change that. Unless it hasn’t been as amazing for you as it’s been for me, which, I mean, totally possible, can’t really imagine anyone else being as happy as I am with you, but, yeah.”_

_“You know it’s been awesome. Completely. But maybe it’s my perfectionism, I don’t know, we can blame it on that if you want, but I don’t want you and me ever to become anything less than awesome. And I can’t shake the feeling that that’s what’ll happen if we try to make this work in college.”_

_Jake sighed. “If you want to break up with me, then we’re broken up. It doesn’t take two. I just want you to know that I don’t agree with your theory. I think we could make it work. But if you don’t want to try, then there’s nothing I can do about it.”_

_“I want to try,” Amy almost said, because she did, she really did, but instead she said what was also true: “I don’t want to fail.”_

_And that was it, she was too scared of failure, too scared of losing Jake to try to keep him, too scared of becoming another high-school-relationship breakup cliche._

_“I do want to...be friends with you, though, I mean, you’ll be the only person I know at either school, I’m definitely going to need to have you around.”_

_“I don’t know,” Jake said, standing up, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know if I can do that. Go from sixty to zero, that quickly. I don’t even think I know how to be friends with you.”_

_“What do you mean? We were friends all last year.”_

_“No. I was in love with you and then you were in love with me, even when we weren’t dating yet. It wasn’t friends since we always were going to be more. To really be friends, we’d have to be over each other. And that we’re not, and we won’t be right away. If you want to break up, we have to do it for real. No contact. No hanging out all the time, no flirting, not even texting, just...none of it. And after a while, maybe, we can try being friends.”_

_“So I break up with you and you respond by cutting me out of your life?”_

_“You’re gonna be hard to get over, Amy Santiago.”_

 

So that was it, and that is how it is now, no contact, nothing. As far as she knows, he hasn’t even been over to the Fox campus, despite the small distance between the two schools (and it really is small, she has to admit now, after seeing several of her first-year hallmates hook up with Fremulon guys). They’re still friends on Facebook, so she’s seen his posts about college life, seen the influx of new friends, seen the green dot next to his name on chat, and she imagines that he’s seen the same things for her, the same indications of a life continually lived. She wonders if he talks to Charles about her, if he was the first person to hear about their breakup, or if that was Amy’s mother, who just shook her head when Amy told her and said, “You do what you need to do to be happy.”

She hasn’t been happy, though. Oh, college is great, awesome, even; she has a 3.85 GPA and is kind of falling in love with art history, and even though her roommate is a little weird, she gets along really well with most of the girls on her floor. She’s joined the student-run newspaper and has even started drinking alcohol: not intensely, of course, just a drink or two at parties, which makes her gigglier and louder and more likely to dance than she remembers being in high school. She might be kind of popular, which is...an unexpected occurrence.

And, even better, she hasn’t lost touch with her friends from high school (with that one notable exception), with Gina and Rosa and Terry and even Charles, and at graduation Mr. Holt asked her to call him Raymond and “keep in touch,” and she’s emailed him a few times about something she’s been doing in one of her classes that connects to AP English.

Amy is content, then, but not really happy. She’s never considered herself the sort of person who needs a boyfriend to feel complete, and she still isn’t--she doesn’t need anyone, but she wants someone, and, unfortunately, that someone is still Jake Peralta.

She was hoping, vaguely, before she arrived, that at college she’d meet someone else, not even to date, just to have a crush on, to deflect the full force of her romantic energy towards. But, of course, Fox is a women’s college, and even though she’s been to a few parties at co-ed Fremulon, and there are guys from there in a couple of her classes, she hasn’t been attracted to any of them. She wants Jake back, has wanted him back since the second she arrived at school and found herself opening the texting function on her phone to send him a message about her roommate’s unfortunate fondness for the _Twilight_ franchise, and had to direct it to Rosa instead, who was sympathetic, but not the same.

She’s considered trying to meet up with him almost every weekend since she’s been there, to ask him if he wants to get coffee or lunch or something, but she remembers his prohibition: no contact, and she can’t bring herself to violate his wishes when he was so respectful of hers. Besides, she dreads hearing him mention another girlfriend, or a crush, or a hookup buddy: because that would just be confirmation that her mistake is irreversible, and although she already knows it is, that there’s no way Jake would ever agree to date her again, after what she said to him, she doesn’t want to know how quickly he’s moved on.

He’s coming to the lunch today, though, she knows it, he responded to the event on Facebook, and as she walks from the train station to school she practices neutral conversation openers. “How were your classes” is a good first question, of course, and so is “Do you like your roommate?” They’re boring, they’re questions you get asked by relatives you’re not particularly close with, but Amy’s pretty okay with being boring: in general, and today specifically.

She’s less than a block away from Schur High when she hears Gina’s shrill voice from behind: “Oh my God, Amy Santiago!”

“Gina!” Amy calls out, and turns back towards her, reaches her arms out in anticipation of a hug.

But Gina brushes past, grabbing one of Amy’s open arms and hooking it into hers, then propelling her forward until they’re inside, talking the whole time. “Girl, how have you been? Are you still considering being an art history major? Because, like, _don’t_ , those people are the worst. Also, why did you choose to go to a girls’ school, I mean, honestly, I currently have seven booty calls on rotation, one for each day of the week, but you have nowhere near my game, and NYU’s gender ratio, while not ideal, is more forgiving than _one hundred to zero_.”

“It’s not a girls’ school, it’s a women’s college,” is all Amy says, and Gina rolls her eyes.

“And let me guess, you’re not a freshman, you’re a _first-year_.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Ugh, well, at least you have Fremulon guys, I guess...speaking of!”

And there he is, there’s Jake, not two feet away, talking to Charles Boyle, until he hears Gina’s voice and looks up in their direction, presumably to say hello...and Amy can see it, can see the exact moment that he notices she’s there, too, because the smile he was wearing a second ago drops off his face immediately.

Gina notices, and rolls her eyes. “Oh my God, are you guys going to be awkward with each other? You broke up, what, six months ago? An eternity in relationship time.”

“Seven months, three days,” says Amy, quietly, but Gina either doesn’t hear or chooses to ignore her.

“ _What_ ever,” she says, instead of responding, and goes over to hug Jake, leaving Amy alone.

She’s struck with a wave of fear that people are going to take sides in their breakup, and that everyone will take Jake’s side--because, why wouldn’t they? Jake’s more fun to be around, and he and Rosa have been friends since they were ten and he and Gina have been friends since they were three, and Charles thinks Jake’s the greatest person in the whole entire world, bar none…

“Hey, Amy!” She turns around to see Terry grinning widely at her, and is surprised by the intensity of the relief that she feels--of course her friends haven’t turned on her, she’s been talking to them all semester, of course no one’s going to feel the need to take sides in what was, after all, an amicable breakup.

“Hey, Terry! How’s Duke?”

“It’s pretty awesome. I’m an RA this year, so that’s been going really well….” Terry keeps talking, but Amy’s not really listening; she’s too busy watching Jake and Gina chatting, trying to figure out if they’re talking about her, or about Jake’s hypothetical new girlfriend, or something else entirely. He looks happy, looks well-adjusted; his hair is shorter than it was in June, and it makes his whole face look more adult. “I just feel like I’ve really matured since coming to college…” Terry is saying, and she’s looking at Jake and wondering: does he feel like he’s matured, too? Is he the same Jake she broke up with?

Terry leaves to talk to Charles, and Amy says goodbye without even really thinking about it.

“Amy Santiago! Very glad to see you here.”

“Mr. Holt! Uh, _Raymond_ ,” Amy corrects herself, feeling a tingle of glee at getting to call her old teacher by his first name--it sounds so sophisticated. “So glad I could make it!”

“How is Fox?”

“Really great! I was nervous about the women’s college atmosphere, at first, you know, but it’s going really well.”

“And you’re enjoying your classes?”

“Yes! Oh, I’m actually taking a course in the classics department next semester. In English, obviously, but I’m really looking forward to it, ever since we did classical poetry in AP English that one time.”

“Ah, yes, I remember that. I’m glad it had an impact on you. What’s this classics course about?”

“It’s a general survey of ancient literature, for non-majors like me. It’s being taught by...oh, what’s her name...Professor Wuntch.”

“Wuntch?” Holt’s face twitches, and the slightly raised tone of voice in which he says the name is his equivalent of a bellow. “Professor _Madeline_ Wuntch?”

“I think so...Do you know her?”

“We were students in the same Ph.D. program. I thought we were friends, but then she sabotaged my dissertation research and I was forced to drop out. My academic career was ruined. I’ve never been the same since.” His voice is unemotional, but Amy’s gotten good enough at reading him to know he means every word.

“I’m sorry,” she says, not sure what she’s apologizing for.

“You will be after taking Madeline’s class. They call me the Hardass around here, but I’m nothing compared to her.”

“Oh,” says Amy. “Well, I guess it’ll be a challenge?”

*

On the first day of the semester, Amy’s absolutely sure to be even earlier to Wuntch’s class than she normally is to everything. She has her college-ruled notebook opened to a new page, her pencils lined up neatly, her water bottle filled for proper hydration. She’s energized, excited, even, at the thought that this might be the hardest class she takes this semester--she’s had no trouble wowing her professors so far, but Wuntch is going to take effort. She feels ready, though, ready for anything.

Then, the door to the classroom opens, and Jake Peralta walks in.


End file.
